To be a pilgrim is to be consciously on a journey.
We are each more or less (or un-) consciously, on the journey of our individual life.
Those who have undertaken to consciously direct their heartsteps, following a call of
spirit, are pilgrims. The call may be very specific, directing one to a precise pathway,
or it may be a vague longing, urging one simply to move. Anyone who heeds this call
may be called a pilgrim.

A perennially popular book (my 1976 copy was the
10th printing and it is still in print) by Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet the Buddha on
the Road, Kill Him!, is subtitled The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients. Written
a couple of decades before the explosion of awareness in the larger community for myths
and stories consciously sought and ingested, Kopp's book weaves ancient tales such as
Gilgamesh with his own experiences and those of his patients in a way that foreshadowed
the bestsellers of Pinkola-Estes, Robert Bly and Joseph Campbell.

Pilgrimage is a fine metaphor for any psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy etymologically means healing the psyche. There are as many
paths as there are pilgrims. Some involve the modern tradition of professional guides with
Ph.D. or MSW initials by their name. I have seen others do pilgrimage as diverse as
intensive martial arts training, writing through the fires of illness to acceptance,
coming out of the gay closet, support groups - such as the early C. R. (consciousness
raising) women's groups and the more recent mythopoetic men's groups. The tasks and the
goals are quite similar in each case: integrating the personality, healing, wholeing the
pilgrim home to oneself and community.

Some of the issues I want to mention include:

The prevalence of pilgrimage tales in world traditions and collective
cultural imaginations.

Ancient Pilgrimages followed continuously for centuries.

Inner and Outer Pilgrimages - simultaneous and complementary.

Being Waylaid

Relativity of Time

Difference between Pilgrimage and Hero's Journey.

Pilgrim Identity

On Being Waylaid

Dante's Divine Comedy, perhaps the greatest
classic of pilgrimage Europe has produced, begins "In the middle of the road of my
life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost." Thus Dante abruptly
begins by recognizing that he has somehow strayed from the path, the perpetual pilgrim
path of a righteous man. He awoke in a dark, frightful wood, and that is the way
any pilgrimage begins - by becoming conscious that one is lost, right where one is. In our
well-fed routine, we wake to face desolate loneliness and dearth of meaning. The dark wood
is the confusion as we see our familiar distracting surroundings remove their masks and
reveal themselves as voracious thieves of time, value and meaning.

There are manifold layers of pilgrimage in Dante's
life and in his masterpiece, and centuries of scholars have and will explore them, but
remember that Dante introduces the great journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise by
acknowledging that he has in the past been on the righteous path and doesn't know how or
when he lost his way.

This is reassuringly familiar. How many paths we
have begun in earnest, like an exercise program or a diet, or a plan to meditate every
morning at 5:30 a.m., from which we've strayed until we awoke, flabby and unenlightened.
There are larger and smaller such resolutions. I chose the diet-exercise-meditate
triumvirate because it is typical New Year's Resolution material, easy to recognize. It is
sad how ungenerous we are with ourselves, with vicious judgments of "failure, loser,
lazy, bad."

We may take heart from our myths - being waylaid is
not uncommon, and may even be part of the pilgrim package.

Siddhartha, in Hermann Hesse's creative
embellishment of a buddha's pilgrimage to enlightenment, gets waylaid for years with the
courtesan Kamala. A careful reading notes that he learned from the experiences he had
there, too, but mostly he was lost, distracted, unconscious.

Even Dante had to be prodded along by his guide, the
poet Virgil, as he was distracted by the storytelling souls, and loitered in horrified
fascination at the spectacles of punishment in the circles of hell.

The pilgrim continues to move toward her goal as
long as she remains conscious. She may be waylaid however. The highwaymen include illness,
injury, television, romance, distraction, illusion. Thus may we stray from the path
unawares. Fortunately, it's all grist for the mill of becoming, but there are
skillful means to avoid the highwaymen. A creative pilgrim may perceive them as simply
ephemeral clouds, or even transform them into guides.

Pilgrim Identity

To call oneself a pilgrim is to latch onto an
ancient community alive now. Paradoxically, it is also to commit to a solitary project.

The community of pilgrims is our tribe. Humans are
social beings and the sense of belonging satisfies us to our depth. This tribalism can be
perverted to an elitist tendency to judge those outside the community as subtribe,
less-than. More useful is the recognition that pilgrims are sangha, the conscious
community of compassionate seekers. You are not alone. You may take refuge in your refugee
status.

Ultimately, the pilgrim recognizes that everyone is
in the tribe, all people are pilgrims, more or less awake (and don't be so sure you know
who's who in the awakeness department, either). First, a pilgrim finds comfort in the
community of seekers who are like him, on a very similar path. This may involve fiercely
identifying with a discrete group for a while, especially if one requires safety for
healing. Some such communities are self-help groups such as ACOA and battered women.
Pilgrims may emerge from such groups politicized and humanized, carrying their gifts to
the larger community. At some point, the pilgrim recognizes the truth that people -
"all sentient beings" - are the sangha. We are all refugees.

At the same time, an intensely personal, individual
pilgrimage occurs. An existential pilgrimage to find the empty-full whole-hole of the
sole-soul.

This very personal, interior pilgrimage which
simultaneously. Traditional walking pilgrimages - to Mecca, Santiago, or the source of the
Ganges, for instance - find the pilgrim in a rare headspace for a western world mind.
There is time, rhythm and very little distraction. One is amazed to find, when the speed
of the external stimuli are slowed, how much cacophony is in one's own mind. As in
meditation, one may find the mind cavorting, dancing, tumbling, shrieking like a monkey.
The surprise is that your mind didn't get busier to compensate for the quiet environment.
It has been monkey mind all along, but as long as the external and internal both kept a
breakneck pace, swinging from branch to branch chattering, informing one another's
agitation, there was nothing to compare.

Wanting to slow down is a nearly universal desire
among readers of Metaphoria. However, the initial discovery of our agitated minds
and our poor ability to control them, leads to self-recrimination, though it could lead to
humor instead.

Many people are actually terrified to spend time
alone in quiet. They are afraid of what they'll find in their own minds. Many of us are
addicted to doing, busyness, distraction. Pilgrimages, including the Mecca, psychotherapy,
mid-life quest or meditation practice, help us learn to be with ourselves.

A quick note on hospitality: This is a
somewhat quaint notion in an almost completely commercialized world, but throughout most
of history, hospitality has been a survival issue. One of the greatest sins in the Bible
is lack of hospitality, for in the harsh Middle Eastern wilderness one's life depends on
it. Medieval European pilgrims depended upon the hospitality of all those along the way,
villagers, farmers and monasteries. While pilgrim traffic also contributed to commerce,
freely-offered hospitality was critical to both the temporal and spiritual life of hosts
as well as guests. And, from hospital to hospice, the tradition of caring for those in
need grew as expressions of hospitality. To care for others is a need within all, so I
encourage each of us, as pilgrims and as hosts, to act upon the impulse to care and be
cared for.

Relativity of Time

On a traditional pilgrimage, one walks. No jet
planes. No trains. No cars. No horses. No camels. One person with two feet. Human-powered.
Being out of doors, carrying very little, moving at three miles an hour, time itself
changes.

Our relationship with time, most readers will
recognize, is highly controlled and frankly artificial. Our actions, our meals, our
relationships, are usually tied to the hands of a clock. The frustration of this imposed
inhuman schedule was expressed by a Woody Guthrie cartoon, "Punching the
clock.", a sketch of a fed-up working man slamming his fist into a time clock as
springs and bolts and numbers fly out of the smashed device.

In big and little ways, the clock roboticizes us.
When people are seen as interchangeable cogs, and clocks as unchanging overseers, you get
such stupid scenarios as my fellow New Englanders driving to work on black ice which will
surely melt when the sun comes up - but heaven forbid that Clock should allow them to wait
two hours.

There is an interesting phenomenon which often
occurs when lay people spend retreat periods in Benedictine monasteries. The Rule of
Saint Benedict specifies a very strict, deliberate and unchanging schedule. Every day
the offices of prayer are at the same time:

This has been so for centuries, perhaps the oldest
continuous timeclock in the Western world, with thousands of monks and nuns punching in
and punching out, well, punctually.

Many of us wonder what could be relaxing or
nourishing about such a schedule. It reminds us of the rat race clock-watching we already
do four to seven days a week. But, combined with many other elements (which may
include chanting, solitude, communal work, silence, and conscious devotional prayer) this
is a human and Earth-based schedule.

Few people in the "modern world" are on
such a schedule. While the time crunch has many of us wake at dawn much of the year, we
don't counterbalance that by retiring early. Au contraire, eight or nine p.m. is prime
time and few people over the age of twelve are expected to be in bed much before the
eleven-o'clock news. By the time that Jay Leno completes his monologue, the long-sleeping
monastery is breathing a pause before the gentle arousal to attend matins. The monastery
is perhaps most like a single organism at this midnight office, rolling out of sleep,
rolling into chapel, murmuring and singing, and then rolling over, back to blessed sleep.
The monastics and their guests are on a solar clock, much more attuned with human body
rhythm, and therefore with our spirit's rhythm, than the odd clock of commerce.

The odd clock of commerce has so completely
supplanted the sun himself that we are barely aware of the change, though our bodies and
spirits know. And the change from human, solar time, to commercial time occurred in less
than a century. A century ago hospitals and newsrooms stayed awake all night, and few
others. As we approach the millennium, the clock of commerce neversleeps.

The clock of commerce does not have the ponderous
tic toc of a grandfather clock, which pendulum swings slow and steady and, through it
measures time, its sound is eternity. No, the clock of commerce eats time, ravenously,
with a frantic tickertape clacking, like the stock exchange in old movies. And it doesn't
chime the angelus hours, but erupts in alarms at chaotic intervals, alarms which are
bright and loud and we call advertisements. Their unpredictability keeps us on edge. They
are sophisticated but obvious seduction, distractions to keep us anxiously sleepwalking,
promising what they can never deliver: fulfillment, beauty, peace, love.

Such gifts cannot be bought. We've known that since
childhood, it's a favorite platitude. But it's hard to counteract the hundreds of messages
to the contrary we encounter each day. Unless we, in equal measure, with equal fanfare,
supply uncommercials to ourselves and each other (e.g. those random acts of
kindness, a few conscious breaths...) then our egos are willing to believe you can buy
love.

Pilgrimage is about the journey to consciousness. It
is exactly not sleepwalking. If you have the opportunity to do a traditional
pilgrimage, such as walking across Spain to San Tiago, or across Poland to Jasna Gora, you
will soon succumb to the solar rhythm and the sovereignty of the weather.

Hundreds of hikers every year trek the Long Trail
here in Vermont and gratefully submit to the same light and meteorologic gods. In fact,
our hiking trails, forest or desert, are even less touched by commerce than those great
old Christian pilgrimages I just mentioned. Shelters and blazes and cairns are everyone's
responsibility, precisely because no one owns the trails.

The spiritual pilgrimage aspect of hiking is made
clear when you read the logbooks. In shelters and covered boxes are bound books for
travelers to write in. Some enter name and date but most make comments which are like
advice or prayer, or both. Personal, heartborn poetry, unselfconscious praises to gaia in
all her gowns, humor, practical advice. While hikers travel in ones, twos, rarely more
than threes (and always single file), they form a community via logbooks and mutual trail
maintenance.

When thousands of Ukrainians and Poles congregate
for one of the ancient rural pilgrimages, they serve one another as a present community,
carrying, as do the trailside logs, prayers and names and advice.

Pilgrim Tales

There is something in us that recognizes, yearns
for, and goes on, pilgrimage. The developmental tasks are forms of pilgrimage. That is why
our perennial tales are full of people who travel - from one life to another, one land to
another, one place to another. Among the most basic archetypes are the Hero and The
Wanderer. From Galahad to Dante to Carlos Casteneda in the West, from Monkey to
Padmasambhava in the East, there are tales of journeys mysterious and fanciful in realms
of geography and psyche.

There is a distinction between the Hero character
and the Pilgrim in traditional tales, therefore they instruct different parts of one's
psyche. The Hero may make a pilgrimage as one part of his tasks, but the Hero's journey is
not classically a pilgrimage. Nor is the Pilgrim a hero. The main difference is the
deliberate nature of pilgrimage. Whether from shrine to shrine in Medieval Europe, or to
Jerusalem, or to North America, a pilgrim has a specific path and goal. A pilgrim
consciously places her foot on the path which will transform her. By contrast, the hero is
surprised into adventure. While characters recurrent in these tales, such as the king's
youngest son, are often set in the hero path by a political crisis, it is not a path of
their choosing. They are thrust into the wild world by circumstance. A moving and
mysterious device in the oldest hero tales is the animal - often a white hind(deer) - who
leads the hero astray, away. Heroes generally have supernatural, that is symbolic, spirit
guides - an animal a wizard or a nymph encountered at critical turns in the journey.
Pilgrims however usually have human guides, including ghosts.

At Pilgrim at
Mid-life

That baby-boomers are getting older is not
news, but we still flinch if that qualifying suffix is misplaced and we are told that we
are getting old. We can still find flimsy comfort - denial - if we say
"older" because, of course, everyone is "getting older", even babies.
"How old is he?" asked about a toddler never implies that the child is old.
So, yes, we are "getting older", we can say that without jeopardizing our
"youthfulness." But it jars us, more accurately it terrifies us, to hear that we
are "getting old."

While glorification of youth - its beauty, energy,
potential fecundity - is natural, even healthy, there is a pathological hatred of age in
the land now. There is a "fundamental lie" that Mark Gerzon eloquently unearths
in his recent writings on mid-life, a lie so pervasive that most westerners accept it
unconsciously. That lie is, simply, that to be young is to be whole and complete, while to
be old is to be broken, damaged, incomplete. How we swallowed such an obvious lie so well
and in so short a time period is frightening testament to the power of media we all love
to believe has no such sway, at least over me.

There are not any lasting societies that have
discarded their elders. Becoming old was, and is, honorable. And, by the way, it is
inevitable.

The classic schmaltzy song, "Young at
Heart" is one old standard I don't like. What a creepy thought that is: old people
with adolescent fourth chakras. A lifetime of practice, many decades of experience, should
produce an old heart. What is an old heart like? I can't say from experience, but
my acquaintances whom I perceive as having old hearts display such traits as patience,
equanimity, serenity, generativity, humor, wisdom, authority.

But an old person with a young heart feels like a
tragedy. Imagine such a person: caught up in peer pressure (the shadow side of identifying
with a community), self-focused, buffeted by unharnessed immature longings, unable to
mentor, stunted.

Our cultural disease of overidentification with young
but adult results in severe devaluing of all other ages. It is said that 80% of
television actors are between 25 and 40 years old (who generally play characters 5 - 10
years younger.) Pervasive contempt for childhood, for the teens, for middle- and old-age
is endemic in our culture. If one stands back just a bit, one can see these patterns
clearly. And it is so bizarre! I cannot overstate that impression.

There are many mid-life pilgrims. To say the timing
is "classic" is to invoke Dante and Odysseus and The Wife of Bath. The journey
at mid-life may be a pilgrimage - that is, conscious - or not, but journey it will be. The
carrot and the stick are both a yearning toward wholeness. Mark Gerzon expressed beautiful
change of bearings: "...our old compasses no longer work. The magnetic fields alter.
The new compass that we need cannot be held in one's hand, only in one's heart."

Quotations

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is
the Zen you bring up there.

Robert Pirsig

Once in a while it hits people that they don't have
to experience the world in the way they been told to.

Allen Keightly

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to
oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you...Look at every
path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary...Does this
path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't it is of no use."

Carlos Chastened, The Teachings of Don Juan,

As different streams have different sources and with
wanderings crooked or straight, all reach the sea, so Lord, the different paths which men
take, guided by their different tendencies, all lead to Thee.

Hindu Prayer, in J. James, The Way of Mysticism, 1950

Let a Christian follow the precepts of his own
faith, let a Hindu and a Jew follow theirs. If they strive long enough, they will
ultimately discover God, who runs a seam under the crusts of rituals and forms.

Swami Nikhilananda, Perspectives on a Troubled
Decade, 1950

If a man wishes to be sure of the road he travels
on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.

Saint John of the Cross

All know the way; few actually walk it.

Bodhidharma

This middle path...is the noble path, namely: right
views, right intent, right speech, right conduct, right means of livelihood, right
endeavor, right mindfulness, right meditation...Which leads to insights, leads to wisdom,
which conduces to calm, to knowledge, to perfect enlightenment, to Nirvana.